Economic Complexity: A New Challenge for the Environment

Abstract

The present paper offers a view regarding the challenge induced in the environment by the productive structure of countries. Economic complexity, which links the productive structure of a country with its knowledge, labour, and sophistication, seems to raise new challenges for the environment’s preservation and quality. The debate on this linkage in existing literature is at a beginning, stimulating the mind of scholars, researchers, and policy makers. The relationship between economic complexity and the environment is multi-faced and creates unimagined challenges for humanity in its path toward social and economic progress. The paper reviews the main dimensions of the linkage between economic complexity and the environment, including moderating factors of this connection as they are reported in the existing literature.